Download or read book The Age of Oligarchy written by Geoffrey Holmes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume, on early and mid-Georgian Britain, shows how the country used its expanding wealth, its new-found social cohesion at home and its international influence abroad to become not only a European but an imperial power. As with the first volume, every aspect of the period is covered.
Download or read book Reorganising Power in Indonesia written by Richard Robison and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and distinctive analysis of the dramatic fall of Soeharto, the last of the great Cold-War capitalist dictators, and of the struggles that reshape the institutions and systems of power and wealth in Indonesia.
Download or read book Oligarchy written by Scarlett Thomas and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Seed Collectors comes a darkly comic take on power, privilege, and the pressure put on young women to fit in—and be thin—at their all–girls boarding school It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Tash finds herself thrown into the school's unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst. The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White Lady whose portraits—featuring a hypnotizing black diamond—hang everywhere and whose ghost is said to haunt the dorms. It's said that she fell in love with a commoner and drowned herself in the lake. But the girls don't really know anything about the woman she was, much less anything about one another. When Tash's friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, the routines of the school seem darker and more alien than ever before. Tash must try to stay alive—and sane—while she uncovers what's really going on. Darkly hilarious, Oligarchy is Heathers for the digital age, a Prep populated with the teenage children of the European elite, exploring youth, power, and affluence. Scarlett Thomas captures the lives of these privileged young women, in all their triviality and magnitude, seeking acceptance and control in a manipulative world.
Download or read book American Oligarchs The Kushners the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power written by Andrea Bernstein and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absorbing, novelistic, and powerfully affecting work of history and investigative journalism that tracks the unraveling of American democracy. In American Oligarchs, award-winning investigative journalist Andrea Bernstein tells the story of the Trump and Kushner families like never before. Building on her landmark reporting for the acclaimed podcast Trump, Inc. and The New Yorker, Bernstein brings to light new information about the families’ arrival as immigrants to America, their paths to success, and the business and personal lives of the president and his closest family members. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and more than one hundred thousand pages of documents, American Oligarchs details how the Trump and Kushner dynasties encouraged and profited from a system of corruption, dark money, and influence trading, and reveals the historical turning points and decisions?on taxation, regulation, white-collar crime, and campaign finance laws?that have brought us to where we are today. A new afterword examines how the two families’ transactional politics left America particularly vulnerable to the crises of 2020.
Download or read book The New Few written by Ferdinand Mount and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This was supposed to be the era when democracy came into its own, but instead power and wealth in Britain have slowly been consolidated the hands of a small elite, while the rest of the country struggles financially and switches off politically. We are now ruled by a gang of fat-cats with fingers in every pie who squabble for power among themselves while growing richer. Bored with watching corrupt politicians jockeying for power, ordinary Britons are feeling disconnected from politics and increasingly cynical about the back-scratching relationship between politicians and big business. The New Fewshows us what has led to this point, and asks the critical questions: whyhas Britain become a more unequal society over the past thirty years? Whyhave the banks been bailed out with taxpayers' money, while bankers are still receiving huge bonuses? Why have those responsible not been held accountable for the financial crash? Why has power in Britain become so concentrated in the hands of corrupt politicians who have been exposed cheating their constituents in the expenses scandal? Despite this bleak diagnosis, there are solutions to the rise of the new ruling class in the modern West. The New Few sets out some of the ways in which we can restore our democracy, bringing back real accountability to British business and fairness to our society.
Download or read book Classical Greek Oligarchy written by Matthew Simonton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical Greek Oligarchy thoroughly reassesses an important but neglected form of ancient Greek government, the "rule of the few." Matthew Simonton challenges scholarly orthodoxy by showing that oligarchy was not the default mode of politics from time immemorial, but instead emerged alongside, and in reaction to, democracy. He establishes for the first time how oligarchies maintained power in the face of potential citizen resistance. The book argues that oligarchs designed distinctive political institutions—such as intra-oligarchic power sharing, targeted repression, and rewards for informants—to prevent collective action among the majority population while sustaining cooperation within their own ranks. To clarify the workings of oligarchic institutions, Simonton draws on recent social science research on authoritarianism. Like modern authoritarian regimes, ancient Greek oligarchies had to balance coercion with co-optation in order to keep their subjects disorganized and powerless. The book investigates topics such as control of public space, the manipulation of information, and the establishment of patron-client relations, frequently citing parallels with contemporary nondemocratic regimes. Simonton also traces changes over time in antiquity, revealing the processes through which oligarchy lost the ideological battle with democracy for legitimacy. Classical Greek Oligarchy represents a major new development in the study of ancient politics. It fills a longstanding gap in our knowledge of nondemocratic government while greatly improving our understanding of forms of power that continue to affect us today.
Download or read book Can Democracy Survive in the 21st Century written by Ronald M. Glassman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the many threats to democracy that exist in the 21st century and tries to understand how democracy can survive economic, social and political crises. It focuses on issues of oligarchy, tyranny, totalitarianism, and ochlocracy. It discusses how these forms of governance manifested themselves in ancient and medieval worlds, and how socio-economic transitions in the 21st century have created conditions that increasingly pose similar threats to modern democracy. The author discusses broad transitions in the contemporary world: economic transition to advanced, high technology capitalism; cultural transition from traditional religious and family values to norms focusing on racial equality, gender and transgender equality and liberation, and multiculturalism; also, transition from the traditional religious worldview to rational-scientific worldview, and from religious morality to secular humanist ethics. These taken together undergird the political transition from traditional authority, involving monarchy and aristocracy, to rational-legal authority, involving constitutional law and democratic participation. The book shows, through extensive country discussions, that whenever these transitions become difficult, undemocratic forms of governance may emerge and override democracy. Authored by an expert in the field, this book touches upon an especially topical theme in the contemporary world and is of interest to a wide readership across the social sciences, from researchers and students to discerning laypersons.
Download or read book The Oligarchy and the Old Regime in Latin America 1880 1970 written by Dennis Gilbert and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-02-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, a new class—the oligarchy—consolidated its wealth and political power in Latin America. Its members were the sugar planters, coffee growers, cattle barons, and bankers who were growing rich in a rapidly expanding global economy. Examining these immensely powerful groups, Dennis Gilbert provides a systematic comparative history of the rise and ultimate demise of the oligarchies that dominated Latin America for nearly a century. He then sketches a fine-grained portrait of three prominent Peruvian families, providing a vivid window into the everyday exercise of power. Here we see the oligarchs arranging the deportation of “political undesirables,” controlling labor through means subtle and brutal, orchestrating press campaigns, extending credit on easy terms to rising military officers, and financing the overthrow of an unfriendly government. Gilbert concludes by answering three questions: What were the sources of oligarchic power? What were the forces that undermined it? Why did oligarchies persist longer in some countries than in others? His clear, comprehensible, and illuminating analysis will make this an invaluable book for all students of modern Latin America.
Download or read book The Anti Oligarchy Constitution written by Joseph Fishkin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold call to reclaim an American tradition that argues the Constitution imposes a duty on government to fight oligarchy and ensure broadly shared wealth. Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the Òrepublican form of governmentÓ the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it has almost nothing to say about this threat. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought. Fishkin and Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this Òdemocracy of opportunityÓ tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to fight for the constitutional right to form a union. During Reconstruction, Radical Republicans argued in this tradition that racial equality required breaking up the oligarchy of slave power and distributing wealth and opportunity to former slaves and their descendants. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers built their politics around this tradition, winning the fight against the Òeconomic royalistsÓ and Òindustrial despots.Ó But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy.
Download or read book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy written by Thom Hartmann and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, looks at the history of the battle against oligarchy in America—and how we can win the latest round. Billionaire oligarchs want to own our republic, and they're nearly there thanks to legislation and Supreme Court decisions that they have essentially bought. They put Trump and his political allies into office and support a vast network of think tanks, publications, and social media that every day push our nation closer and closer to police-state tyranny. The United States was born in a struggle against the oligarchs of the British aristocracy, and ever since then the history of America has been one of dynamic tension between democracy and oligarchy. And much like the shock of the 1929 crash woke America up to glaring inequality and the ongoing theft of democracy by that generation's oligarchs, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has laid bare how extensively oligarchs have looted our nation's economic system, gutted governmental institutions, and stolen the wealth of the former middle class. Thom Hartmann traces the history of this struggle against oligarchy from America's founding to the United States' war with the feudal Confederacy to President Franklin Roosevelt's struggle against “economic royalists,” who wanted to block the New Deal. In each of those cases, the oligarchs lost the battle. But with increasing right-wing control of the media, unlimited campaign contributions, and a conservative takeover of the judicial system, we're at a crisis point. Now is the time for action, before we flip into tyranny. We've beaten the oligarchs before, and we can do it again. Hartmann lays out practical measures we can take to break up media monopolies, limit the influence of money in politics, reclaim the wealth stolen over decades by the oligarchy, and build a movement that will return control of America to We the People.
Download or read book Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy written by Aristotle and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection contains: Aristotle's The Constitution of Athens Xenophon's The Politeia of the Spartans The Constitution of the Athenians ascribed to Xenophon the Orator The Boeotian Constitution from the Oxyrhynchus Historian In bringing together, translating, and annotating these constitutional documents from ancient Greece thirty five years ago, J. M. Moore produced an authoritative work of the highest scholarship. An explanatory essay by classics scholar Kurt A. Raaflaub expands this indispensable collection.
Download or read book Oligarchy written by Jeffrey A. Winters and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-18 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, oligarchs were viewed as empowered by wealth, an idea muddled by elite theory early in the twentieth century. The common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them and inherently exposes them to threats. The existential motive of all oligarchs is wealth defense. How they respond varies with the threats they confront, including how directly involved they are in supplying the coercion underlying all property claims and whether they act separately or collectively. These variations yield four types of oligarchy: warring, ruling, sultanistic and civil. Moreover, the rule of law problem in many societies is a matter of taming oligarchs. Cases studied in this book include the United States, ancient Athens and Rome, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, medieval Venice and Siena, mafia commissions in the United States and Italy, feuding Appalachian families and early chiefs cum oligarchs dating from 2300 BCE.
Download or read book What Is an Oligarchy written by Joseph K. Brennan and published by Forms of Government (Crabtree). This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains what an oligarchy is, provides examples of oligarchies around the world, and looks at how the form of government has evolved throughout history.
Download or read book Persistent Oligarchs written by Mark Wasserman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did the Mexican Revolution do away with the ruling class of the old regime? Did a new ruling class rise to take the old one's place--and if so, what differences resulted? In this compelling study, the first of its kind, Mark Wasserman pursues these questions through an analysis of the history and politics of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua from 1910 to 1940. Chihuahua boasted one of the strongest pre-revolutionary elite networks, the Terrazas-Creel family. Wasserman describes this group's efforts to maintain its power after the Revolution, including its use of economic resources and intermarriage to forge partnerships with the new, revolutionary elite. Together, the old and new elites confronted a national government that sought to reestablish centralized control over the states and the masses. Wasserman shows how the revolutionary government and the popular classes, joined in opposition to the challenge of the elites, finally formalized into a national political party during the 1930s. Persistent Oligarchs concludes with an account of the Revolution's ultimate outcome, largely accomplished by 1940: the national government gaining central control over politics, the popular classes obtaining land redistribution and higher wages, and regional elites, old and new, availing themselves of the great opportunities presented by economic development. A complex analysis of revolution as a vehicle for both continuity and change, this work is essential to an understanding of Mexico and Latin America, as well as revolutionary politics and history.
Download or read book John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy written by Luke Mayville and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why American founding father John Adams feared the political power of the rich—and how his ideas illuminate today's debates about inequality and its consequences Long before the "one percent" became a protest slogan, American founding father John Adams feared the power of a class he called simply "the few"—the wellborn, the beautiful, and especially the rich. In John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville explores Adams’s deep concern with the way in which inequality threatens to corrode democracy and empower a small elite. Adams believed that wealth is politically powerful not merely because money buys influence, but also because citizens admire and even identify with the rich. Mayville explores Adams’s theory of wealth and power in the context of his broader concern about social and economic disparities—reflections that promise to illuminate contemporary debates about inequality and its political consequences. He also examines Adams’s ideas about how oligarchy might be countered. A compelling work of intellectual history, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy has important lessons for today’s world.
Download or read book Neoliberalism Oligarchy and Politics of the Event written by Žarko Paić and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on insight into Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, which consider the notion of neoliberalism for all future relationships between individuals and society, and the state and the economy, this book shows that the oligarchic model of politics and culture management today is a result of the rise and fall of mass political movements. The ideologies of the end of the twentieth century with which neo-liberalism perfectly establishes a balance are reflected in the combination of technoscience, rational choice and individualism. In this way, the rule is reversed into a cybernetic market as a management model. Today, transnational corporations control the states and their political subjects, with sovereignty rendered an illusion by the obsolescence of the modern project. Since the post-imperial order in the 21st century requires the expansion of total power rather than the fragmentation of freedom, it is necessary to explore the hybrid relationship between economics and politics. The corporate system of activities denotes a subject to all forms of organization of the state and society, from the trade unions to the universities, from institutionalized religion to social welfare and sport. The consequence of this can be seen in the disappearance of the essence of society. This book investigates the logic of world-historical progress from the cybernetic governance system and the new way of legitimizing capitalism in the 21st century to all forms of suspension of fundamental ideas which have marked the politics of modernity.
Download or read book Beyond Oligarchy written by Michele Ford and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Oligarchy is a collection of essays by leading scholars of contemporary Indonesian politics and society, each addressing effects of material inequality on political power and contestation in democratic Indonesia. The contributors assess how critical concepts in the study of politics—oligarchy, inequality, power, democracy, and others—can be used to characterize the Indonesian case, and in turn, how the Indonesian experience informs conceptual and analytical debates in political science and related disciplines. In bringing together experts from around the world to engage with these themes, Beyond Oligarchy reclaims a tradition of focused intellectual debate across scholarly communities in Indonesian studies. The collapse of Indonesia's New Order has proven a critical juncture in Indonesian political studies, launching new analyses about the drivers of regime change and the character of Indonesian democracy. It has also prompted a new groundswell of theoretical reflection among Indonesianists on concepts such as representation, competition, power, and inequality. As such, the onset of Indonesia’s second democratic period represents more than just new point of departure for comparative analyses of Indonesia as a democratizing state; it has also served as a catalyst for theoretical and conceptual development.
